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hello, and welcome to another episode of the8-bit guy. today i’m going to show you four vintagedigital cameras, and these do not use memory cards. some of these use floppy disks, some use superdisks,and even 3 inch compact discs. then i’m going to take you around dallasand show you some interesting landmarks using these cameras to take pictures. ok, so the first camera i want to show youis the original sony mavica from 1997. by the way, the term mavica actually standsfor magnetic video camera. so this is my friend brandon, who runs anantique reproductions furniture store, and i met him through the synth meet because heis heavily into synthesizers and keyboards

like i am on my other channel. but, he is also an original owner of a sonymavica. and since i never actually owned a mavicaback in the 1990s, i wanted to have brandon here to tell you about his experience of actuallyusing one. now, before i can talk too much about this,i need to set the stage with a little history lesson. in 1997, you can easily say that 99% or moreof the population was still using film cameras, with only a tiny percentage using digitalcameras. so, we were at that stage where the earlyadopters were buying them, but the general population just really couldn’t see thepoint yet.

they were happy with their film cameras, andthe digital cameras were pretty expensive. they didn’t know where they would get theirprints made. but really, the biggest challenge, i thinkfor most digital camera users of the 1990s was simply figuring out how to get the picturesfrom their camera to their computer. this was a typical computer that somebodymight have in 1997. most people were still running windows 95,or even windows 3.1 on their pcs. and the macintosh was only just a few percentof the market share. one thing you might notice is that it hasno usb ports. you see, usb didn’t exist.

well, technically it was invented in 1996. but it wasn’t really available to consumersuntil 1998, a year after the mavica came onto the market. and even then, 99% of the population stilldid not have usb on their computers. so in 1997 there were a handful of 1st generationdigital cameras on the market, and nearly all of them required use of the serial portin order to transfer photos. so, serial ports, they always had like irqconflicts and all kinds of software problems, and of course there was no native operatingsystem support for these cameras. so you would have to install proprietary softwareand drivers in order to use these cameras,

they often didn’t work right and there werelots of problems and each camera was completely different from the next camera, so there wasno standardization on how anything worked. if you had a laptop, you might be lucky enoughto get one of these devices, that allowed you to use a memory card and insert it intothe pc card socket of your laptop, which appeared as a native storage device for the computer. i don’t believe any such devices existedfor desktop computers. so the beauty of the mavica was that you couldtake your photos, then remove the floppy disk and insert it directly into your pc and copythe files off, because every computer had a floppy drive back then!

and if you compared to a roll of film, youcould typically store 20 or 30 exposures on a roll. if you were going on vacation, it was probablyjust as convenient to carry around a bunch of floppy disks as it would have been filmrolls. even these old kodak disc film cartridgesonly had 15 exposures on a disk. the mavica could store around 20 photos ona single disk. not only that, but unlike film cameras ofthe time, it was possible to review your photos and delete the ones you didn’t want. i distinctly remember that about half of thephotos i took on my film cameras ended up

in the trash after getting them developed. so, you know, everybody is used to their camerason their phone, and they just take pictures of everything. but, back in the days of film cameras, youknow, you had 24 exposures on a roll of film, and you were pretty conservative as to whatyou took pictures of. you didn’t just go around shooting this,that, and the other. you were like “oh, this is a good shot,that i need to take a picture of.” but with the digital camera, having the convenienceof the floppy disk, you know i was going around taking pictures of everything.

and then, once i filled up the disk, i eitherpopped a new one in, or i would take it to the computer and dump it to the hard drive,so yeah, i was taking tons of pictures. and, in my business, in the furniture business,pictures are important, when i have customers in other cities. i used to have to draw stuff on a piece ofpaper and send it through a fax machine and hope that they could figure out what the heckthat i drew. but with email and cameras, yeah! sony originally released two versions of themavica in 1997. there was the low end fd5 and the high endfd7.

both had the same 640x480 resolution, bothhad the same 2.5” color lcd on the back. but the fd5 had a fixed focus lens, and thefd7 had a 10x zoom, which is really nice. the low end model retailed for $599 and thehigh end for $799. so i happen to have the high end version,with the 10x zoom. now the first thing people notice when i showthem this camera is that it is unusually large and bulky. despite being 20 years old, there are somethings you are likely to be familiar with. for example, if you hold the shutter buttondown part of the way, the camera will lock the focus and wait for you to depress it thefull way before taking the photo.

at which point, the floppy drive will fireup and you will have to wait while it saves your photo. *buzz buzz* it does have a flash, and rather nice zoomcontrols, as well as a manual focus with an actual knob. the screen does have some menus but therearen’t many options to select. incidentally, this screen only has 165 by124 pixels. so it is barely good enough to use for menusand so the lcd was really just good enough for a basic viewfinder, you know just to knowwhat the heck it is you’re actually pointing

the camera at. you know, another interesting thing is thatmost digital cameras, even from this time period, had an option to select differentphoto resolutions. but you’ll notice no such setting in themenus on this thing. but it does have field and frame. now you may be wondering what the heck thatmeans. well, you see, sony didn’t use a dedicatedccd sensor for this camera. they actually borrowed one from their consumercamcorder line of products. so the ccd in this thing was one that youmight have also found in a handicam that used

8mm video cassettes. so the actual ccd had a horizontal resolutionof 570 pixels. but the vertical resolution is much harderto explain. since it is designed for interlaced ntsc video,it uses two fields, which are scanned 1/60th of a second apart. so, the first field is 245 pixels. and so if you have the camera in field mode,the resolution is 570 by 245, pretty simple! but if you put it into frame mode, it willalso capture the second field, giving you a total of 570 by 490 resolution.

so, regardless of the mode, it would alwaysinterpolate the images up to 640 by 480 resolution. now, that resolution doesn’t sound verygood, but really, it wasn’t too bad considering at that time, the typical screen resolutionmost computers were running at was 640 by 480. for example, if i display a photo from thiscamera, it actually fills the entire screen on this computer because, well, that’s thenative resolution on this laptop. let me show you an example of a photo i tookin field mode, you can see there’s a lot of jagged edges around this area here. now here’s the same image taken in framemode. looks much better, right?

so you might ask why they would even includethe field mode in the first place. well, the reason has to do with the way theccd is designed to scan the two fields a few milliseconds apart from each other.. so if there is any motion it will turn outblurry in frame mode. in fact, if you notice, when i turn on thecamera flash, it automatically disables frame mode, because the flash only lasts long enoughto illuminate one field. so, i wanted to show you a few more photos,so i decided to take a little trip. in a previous episode i showed you some landmarksof dallas/fort worth, and today i’m going to show you some interesting places in dallas.

unfortunately, it was totally overcast onthis sunday in november. so here’s me arriving at dallas city hall,fortunately they are closed on sunday. i took advantage of their ev charging providedin the parking lot. it may not seem familiar on this side, butthe other side should look familiar to you, because it was the headquarters in the 1987movie robocop! so even though robocop is supposed to takeplace in detroit, it was actually filmed all in dallas. in fact, you can clearly see reunion towerin the backdrop of this car chase scene. incidentally, reunion tower was also destroyedin the movie asteroid. but don’t worry, reunion tower is stillhere and i can safely walk through these passageways

at city hall without any fear of being attackedby a giant robot. and look what i found, an old vintage payphone,now this relic ought to be on my channel, this is a historical piece of technology isn’tit? i haven’t seen one of these in ages. ok, so here we are at the dallas city hall,which you’ve seen in the robocop movie, and it looks a little bit different becausethey put a matte painting to make it look like it was taller than it really was. but it’s still a very interesting architecture. and i’m going to take some pictures usingmy vintage floppy disk cameras and we’ll

see what it looks like. anyway, i setup a tripod and here’s a photoi took on the mavica fd7. i also took some other shots of some of thesurrounding areas. so, i thought i’d be an ultra hipster andtake my 20 year old vintage digital camera to the dallas auto show. now, the irony here is that i’m using avintage camera to take a picture of a brand new piece of high technology, the chevroletbolt ev. so the photos really aren’t thatgreat of quality by today’s standards, and honestly they weren’t even that great bythe standards of film cameras of the era.

i went with the mavica, the fd7, mainly becauseof the floppy drive. and the instant gratification that, beingable to take a picture on the camera, popping it out, popping it into the computer, emailingmy customer a picture of a piece of furniture, that was for me the way to go. so, if i went with a scanner, those guys were around $500 to $800, and they were better quality. you could get up to 300 dpi resolution fora full page, but you still had to take the pictures with a film camera, run them downto your hourly, you know one-hour-photo developer, then come back, look through all of the pictures,find the one that you like, scan it, and then email your customer.

but with this guy, you could take 5 pictures,and then pick the best 2 or 3, i could email my customers a new piece of furniture thatjust came in, and hopefully i’ve got a sale. ok, now i want to move 3 years ahead and seehow the mavica evolved. this is the fd85. and while it is very similar to the one ijust showed you, it has some very important evolutionary changes. for one thing, it has over 4 times the resolution,now clocking in at 1.3 megapixels, using a ccd that is dedicated for digital cameras. let me show you how much better these photoslook that were taken with this camera.

it’s amazing what 3 years can do for thistechnology. i would really say this is really the thresholdwhere digital cameras quality surpassed film cameras, at least for personal use. the hardcore photographers held out anotherfew years with film. another interesting feature of this camerais that it has a 4x speed floppy drive. so, listen to the old drive and how fast itchanges tracks... and now listen to this one. * camera snap noise * *tap tap tap tap tap tap buzz buzz*

that’s pretty interesting because in allof the time the floppy drive was in use for pcs, nobody really ever attempted to makethe drive faster. you know, i guess there just wasn’t muchof a need. but when the camera came out and people didn’treally want to wait around to take the next photo, i guess suddenly there was a need,so i guess there was a reason to make it faster. this camera also introduced the ability touse this nifty device. it’s a floppy disk adapter that takes amemory stick, and can be inserted into the camera. now, unfortunately, this will not work withthe older mavicas because the firmware has

to know how to actually use this. but, this allowed the mavica to store a lotmore photos. so you might ask if you could stick this thinginto a regular pc’s floppy drive and read it like a disk? well, the answer is yes and no. so, you see, it required a special driverto be installed, and the only driver i could find that works with this is for windows xp. so, also, it requires an actual internal floppydrive using the original standardized controller. so that really limits the number of computersthat you could use this on.

so, for example, there’s no way you wouldever be able to use it with one of these usb floppy drives, even if it were running onwindows xp, because it’s not a standard controller. the camera also included a composite videoport so that you could play back your photos on a tv, so the whole family could see them. another interesting feature added was theability to take movie clips. now, the resolution was a very low 320 by240 and the clips could only be a few seconds long because the floppy disk simply can’thold very much. but still, that’s certainly something yourfilm camera couldn’t do!

so, you would have needed to bring a separatevideo camera in order to do that! ok, so here’s a really rare camera i wantto show you. this was a competitor to sony’s mavica. it was made by panasonic. it came out around 1999, around the same timeas the last mavica i just showed you. now, the major advantage this camera has isthat it uses the ls-120 superdisk format. it can use regular 1.44 floppies, but whowould want to when you can use these futuristic looking superdisks that store 120 mb per disk. you would need 84 floppy disks to store thesame amount of data as a single superdisk.

so you’ll notice that using a blank floppydisk, it says it can store 1 movie clip, 17 low-res photos, or 5 superfine photos. now with a blank superdisk, it says you canstore 90 movie clips, over 1500 low res photos, or 480 superfine photos. now one huge disadvantage to the ls-120 formatwas that most computers could not read it unless you bought an ls-120 drive, and thoseweren’t cheap. so in a pinch you could still use a regular1.44 floppy if you needed to. so one of the interesting things about thiscamera is that i can turn it over to pc mode. and at that point it just becomes a storagedevice.

it will even work on my modern computer. and it just mounts itself as a disk and ican drag and drop the files right off of it. so, with the camera plugged into my pc likethis, it really just becomes an external ls-120 super disk drive, so it kind of takes the place of having one of these. it’s not as elegant to use, but hey it works. now unfortunately, when i went to dallas,i accidentally had this camera set in low resolution mode, so these pictures don’treally do the camera justice. but i did get a sample of the video clip mode. so i did take a few extra photos around herein the proper resolution to give you something

to look at. this is a 1.3 megapixel camera, very similarto the second mavica that i showed you. so the one annoying thing about this panasoniccamera is its size. i mean, it’s the biggest of all four ofthese and all four of these are really too large in my opinion, but this one is particularlybulky and it’s not something i want to be carrying around and using a lot. ok, so i want to jump ahead another 3 years. this camera represents the very end of themavica line. and, as you can see, they have ditched thefloppy disk in favor of a 3 inch compact disc.

now, it can use regular cd-r or cd-rw discs. so naturally, it could hold quite a bit moredata than a floppy disk, and yet still maintain compatibility with most computers of the time. of course, today most computers don’t actuallyhave optical drives. all of the computers i have around the houseare slot-loading drives so they can’t mount the 3 inch discs anyway. in fact, the only computer i could find thatcould read these discs was this old ibook clamshell of mine that has a spindle thati can manually pop the disc onto. now the great thing is with this camera isthat it does support usb so it doesn’t really

even matter if you can read the discs, becauseall you’ve got to do is plug this into your modern computer’s usb port. and i can actually drag and drop the photosright off this camera without even needing to take the disc out. some interesting aspects of using a cd forthis is that you have to tell the camera to initialize the disc before you can use it. it warns that you have to sit the camera ona stable surface before doing this. when you are done with the disc, you haveto finalize it if you want to be able to read it in a computer.

however, if you use usb to grab the photos,it is really not necessary to finalize the disc. and while you can use any disc in the camerathat will fit, it will always complain and suggest that you use special mavica brandedcds. for example, this one actually has the mavicalogo on it and it seems to like this one better. so what about the photo quality? well, it is 3 megapixels and to be honest,even though this camera is 13 years old, i think the photo quality actually holds upvery well even by today’s standards. and actually i've said this for years, i think 3 megapixels is really the limit to good photos.

this is my opinion, of course, but i think3 megapixels is roughly the threshold where it’s really good enough for most uses, especiallywhen viewed on a computer, and i think adding more megapixels beyond that, you get kindof diminishing returns. you have to add a whole let extra to reallybe able to notice any difference. and, a lot of the cheap cameras, especiallythe ones with plastic lenses, they can’t even resolve more than about 3 megapixelsinto focus on the imager. so i’ve seen cameras before that have 10megapixel imagers but you really can’t see any difference in detail between 3 and 10megapixel settings on that camera. this camera also has a 3x optical zoom.

so i could use this as an everyday camerafor both work and play, that is if i didn’t mind waiting for it to write those imagesto cd. and, of course, it does have video clip capability,it does 640 by 480 but the image is very soft and the frame rate is pretty low, but it isthe best video quality of the 4 cameras i’ve shown today. ok, so i’ve got to open this old box ofkodak disc film. look! the expiration date was in 1990. wow, i haven’t opened one of these in along time. i don’t even think you can get these developedanymore.

well, there you go. there’s an old kodak disk cartridge. ok, so which of these 4 cameras is my favorite? you might assume that i would immediatelyjump on this one, because it is after all the best and most advanced camera of thisgroup. and if for some reason i was forced to useone of these cameras as my daily work and pleasure camera, well, this would be the onei would naturally pick. however, to be honest, i have no reason todo that, because i can just use my good, modern cameras or even my cell phone for that matter.

so, my actually, my favorite is the originalsony mavica fd7, because it is the most, i think, collectible. it’s the oldest and it’s got the mostunique qualities to it. speaking of collectibility, i only paid $15for this on ebay. in fact, i didn’t pay more than $15 forany of these cameras. there seems to be quite a few of them around,with the exception of the panasonic superdisk camera; this one was hard to find. but it still didn’t cost very much wheni did find one. but the other cameras, the mavicas, they justmade so many of them, they are really easy to find.

i think they’ll be good collectible camerasin the future. well, i hope you enjoyed this and as always,stick around because i've got more stuff coming up! # music # # blooper reel # alright, so this is my friend brandon, whoruns a….*laughing wheeze* never actually originally owned a mavica, i’m onlykind of...ahhh…. in the 1990s, um, i thought... ah... i need a blooper roll on this one.